Malcolm McLaren: Synthesizer of Genius

Malcolm McLaren died this morning in Switzerland of a brutal cancer, mesothelioma. He was only sixty-four. I last saw Malcolm and his companion of many years, Young Kim, at Marina Abramovi&#263’s birthday party, last November, and we made plans for a dinner in February, at a little place in the East Village, where Malcolm and Young—who loved good food, especially Asian food—knew the chef. They never mentioned his illness. (We were old friends, but I wasn’t part of their inner circle.) Young was several decades Malcolm’s junior, and her looks are deceptive. She is tiny and beautiful, and she dresses girlishly, although always in the edgiest high fashion. One had the impression, though, that their complicated lives on several continents ran smoothly thanks to her competence and maturity. She weighs at most ninety pounds, yet she was Malcolm’s ballast.

When I saw them last fall, Malcolm and Young were full of plans for work and travel, especially work—new projects, which is to say, new fusions. Malcolm was, among his many gifts, a synthesizer of genius. He was far too restless to be content with or contained by a single genre. Fusion can be explosive, as one knows, and Malcolm was an heir of the anarchists, who spawned the Dadaists, who sired the Situationists, who helped to fertilize the counterculture of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Malcolm was a born provocateur. Profound irreverence towards authority was the hallmark of his generation, and a hallmark of youth, and, in that sense, he died young.

In one of her last e-mails, Young described the “artwork, a film” that Malcolm was making. “It is based on a century of French advertising,” she wrote. “He found a private archive, and culled bits and pieces from various cinema advertisements (most of the ads are old, and France didn’t allow commercial advertising on TV until 1968, and actually banned it last year, so they only had forty years of TV ads). Many of the works were made by famous artists—the oldest is by the Lumière Brothers in 1897. There are works by (and featuring) Max Ernst, Tati, Godard, Jean Renoir, and many more…. It’s very witty, beautiful, and intellectual (with many references)—but entertaining.” The last sentence describes the Malcolm whom I knew.